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Jungle-Busy-Earnin

Jungle are a hip, retro-disco/soul duo from the UK. A band that has been featured on Tea Time with Jon Williams and also nominated for the 2014 Mercury Prize.

The band’s album is titled Jungle. Their feature cut is called “Busy Earnin'” and its a a fun retro-soul cut with a modern electronic edge. The band says in Cult Montreal that they basically sample their own music!

“There’s no software stuff on there. It’s pretty much all live audio recording, but manipulated in order to sound electronic. There are synths on there, but warm analogue ones. Most of the album was recorded that way, and then re-sampled. We wanted a record that sounded like it was sampled, but to not have to lift samples from other people. So everything was made by us, and it was inspired somewhat by Kanye West, strange as it sounds. We thought about “Touch the Sky,” but wondered how it could be done without sampling one of the best horn and string riffs ever written. You can’t beat it. How can we create something that sounds modern and sampled, but will still sound familiar to people?”

Talking more specifically of the single “Busy Earnin’,” ““Busy Earnin’” started as a seven-minute psychedelic track. It was a funky jam without a structure, and we took the horns and started playing around with looping it.”

Go with yourself.

blue screen
AV Club wrote a fun article taking us back to indie rock circa 2004. They focused on Pinback‘s album Summer in Abaddon. Also…they had a little shoutout to Hype Machine. Nice.

I used to love that album and still listen to it quite a bit today. I ended up down the musical rabbit hole today while at the radio factory and re-discovered a beauty off the previous record, Blue Screen Life. A song called “Concrete Seconds.”

I love that line, “Anything I say to you is gunna come out wrong anyway.”  Beautiful.

An interesting slice of daily drama for some guy unfolds during this 4 minutes and 8 seconds. I wonderer if he ever figured it out? What did the woman’s t-shirt say?

Go with yourself.

tegan and sara

Trolling my “Big IN America” radio chart and dredging up a few fun, poppy alternative cuts.

Night Terrors of 1927 have a delightfully novel band name….and they have a song feature Canada’s favourite wonder twins Tegan & Sara.

Principle Jarrod Gorbel was in a group called The Honorary Title. After that band’s run, he teamed up with Rilo Kiley guitarist Blake Sennett. Their ep is called Anything to Anyone and is out thurrrr now.

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The Eeries are from Los Angeles, California. I searched their name in the google and an article from Spin popped up about how Frances Bean Cobain is engaged to the lead singer.

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Melanie Martinez was an interesting one to see on some US alternative stations. She  was a contestant on TV singing show The Voice. She does create pop music, but it has a slight edge and darkness to it which I guess is what is attracting some Alt-radio stations to give her a try. The song is catchy and beautifully performed so let’s give it a spin.

Go with yourself.

fitness

Smack dab in the middle of week 2 of Boxing Bootcamp. November 22nd, this DJ/music blogger will fight a real life person during a gala boxing match! Yesterday I learned about protein, and fuel, and recovery…and then today I was yapping with Dylan Willows and absorbing more. I know for people who regularly enjoy the fitness, it’s all pretty standard. But this whoe protein shake lifestyle is new to me!

I’ve been enjoying waking up at 5:30AM every morning for a hard hour of boxing and fitness. After a great workout…I do feel sore. I know that being new to working out, there is soreness…but I didn’t know about recovery, and what foods I could be eating to help with that recovery. Thank you to Chris at Popeye’s Victoria and DW here at The Zone for them wisdom. Looking forward to my new regime of protein shakes, and…bananas?

Here is a radio promo we made for the Charity Boxing Classic.

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I received a message the other day from a rapper out of Lexington, Kentucky! The artist is called Reva. It’s kinda grimy, small town hip hop. I like her style. The vocal hook catchy…the beats distorted.

Go with yourself.

leisure_cruise_sailing
A couple recent adds to the “New Music Folder” here at the radio factory.

Leisure Cruise are the Brooklyn duo of Leah Siegal and Dave Hodge. Us proud indie rocking Canucks will know the name Dave Hodge from his work touring with Broken Social Scene .

Dave was saying the band concept for Leisure Cruise happened by accident. His original concept was writing the music and having a revolving door or co-performers and singers…but a chance meeting with Leah on a Brooklyn street had him inviting her in to write. After that first writing session they felt like they didn’t need other people.

Some blogs call Dave and Leah’s style apocalypse pop…but Leah says that is not entirely accurate in Interview Magazine; “In the news, one day I got a news alert that they found three planets that could support human life. So, at that point, I was coming over to Dave’s studio. Basically we were in the studio all the time. The idea is that leaving this planet for another one made me a lot less depressed. It was about being happy, and Dave felt the same way. Writing, we maintained that feeling. We just kept being inspired by this idea that we could leave, and it just made us feel better. It wasn’t this dark, apocalyptic emotion. The apocalypse is just positive change: change that comes out of nowhere, but change that is positive.”

The début record is out now… our radio feature cut is called “Sailing.”

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barr5

The Barr Brothers are from Montreal. Right now… red hot. You’re hearing these guys on the CBC, touring nations with The War on Drugs (which makes a lot of sense), in the Montreal Gazette and even the Globe!

Their album, Sleeping Operator, is out today from Secret City Records. Our feature song on the Zone should be an easy one to slip into if you like the hazy chilled out folk style.

Go with yourself.

baby
My wife tracked down her old Motorola Razr flip phone the other day. We plugged it in and came across a bunch of old pictures. She found this beauty… the day she told me she was pregnant with our daughter Madelyn.

I picked her up on Yates Street in front of our first apartment together. She was emotional, told me she was pregnant. I said, “do you wanna keep it?” She said, “yes.” I said, “cool. We’d better hurry up…don’t want to be late for Monster Trucks.” And off we went to host a suite of radio contest winners in a suite at the arena.

Now we’re totally married with kids!

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OK, enough with the “dear diary” … let’s get to it.

A song that screamed up the Hype Machine charts. The mysterious (being mysterious is so hot right now) Eastside. This BLOG says we don’t know anything about her (they do have a picture of a woman’s back…maybe Eastside’s?). But we do know she sounds amazing and her cover-mash of Ed Sheeran’s “Don’t” crossed with Chris Brown’s “Loyal” is novel.

This song has been on repeat.

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Jaymes Young is another British duder… Earbuddy says this song is so much more than a devastating love song…there is a depth or darkness that might lurk behind the simple promise to be “a better man.”

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One of the women I do boxing training with is named Debbie Stirling. She was tellling me that she is currently obsessed with Clean Bandit. Then the other day I was trolling the “Most Shazamed in Victoria” chart… and somewhere around #4… Clean Bandit. And now today… #4 on Hype Machine, Clean Bandit. Something is up…let’s hit play on the new song “Real Love.”

and then revisit their MONSTER jam “Rather Be.”

Happy Friday!

Go with yourself.

Kanye

Joel Almand is Almond. If you hit his website, the man from Buffalo, New York seems to like the stages set up in sunny places. I can dig it.

He sent over his spin on The Chainsmokers second original, Kanye. You’ll remember their first, the Top 40 radio infection “#SELFIE.” That song sounded like a Las Vegas style fist pumper with the cross-fit hammer heavy 2013 lyrical theme. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t dropped it more than once into my set. Now a song called “Kanye?” For real.

The guys in The Chainsmokers created a very uplifting power party rocker using Kanye as a metaphor for “not giving a fuck.”

From The Chainsmokers’ soundcloud: “This is real, this isn’t about love or partying or carpe diem shit, the same way we always hear it, this is some real life every day real world way to convey an important message…

As Kanye said, ‘ I refuse to accept other people’s ideas of happiness for me. As if there’s a ‘one size fits all’ standard for happiness.'”

Enter the Almond.

Almond brightens up the original and keeps the focus on a pounding party rocking house beat. It doesn’t genre hop like the original. All the same, the original nut of the song remains and that strong vocal hook.

Go with yourself.

Big-Data-Dangerous-Oliver-Remix-1024x1024

Big Data released a remix ep on the old iTunes machine.  The collection features this Oliver remix of the Alt-radio monster “Dangerous.”

Big Data….that can be some scary shit….when you’re online dating.

Go with yourself.

walk the moon

Rob Severyn from Sony Records stopped by the radio factory. He is in Victoria in support of the Brad Paisley tour…but before the country night at the arena, Rob wanted to talk alternative radio jammers from Sony.

One song Rob said we should check out is the new Walk The Moon single, “Shut Up and Dance.”

The Cincinnati band had one of the “songs of the summer” back in 2011. The sleeper hit “Anna Sun.”

Their new record is called Talking Is Hard and comes out in December.

Go with yourself.

WWPJP

Scottish rockers We Were Promised Jetpacks will have a new record called Unravelling released on October 6th.

The press release from FatCat speaks to the themes of the album. “Many of the lyrics within conjure the notion of a conflicted protagonist struggling to keep his life on course, while battling a creeping sense of uncertainty and impending doom.”

Go with yourself.